Summary of a Zotero Source: Steven Kent’s “The First Quarter”

So history is a favorite subject of mine, almost personal to me (though i’m still not really sure why - it’s just always i’ve liked, i guess).  Anyway, combine that with video games and you have a whole mess of awesome.  Thus comes into play Steven L. Kent’s The First Quarter: A 25-year History of Video Games. 

    The name pretty much says it all.  Though he touches on the “pre-history” of video games, namely the time of the pinball, the mainstay of this book (written in 2000) is the early history of video games from the 1970’s to (what was then) today.  Starting with Space War and Pong, he moves along into the era of Atari, the crash of the early 80’s, the rise of Nintendo, the 16-bit wars, then into the Playstation era, and finally ending with what was then the upcoming “Next Gen.” 

What makes this an interesting read and not simply a linear dialogue is the inclusion of quotes and commentary from industry players - indeed, a full third (i’d say) of the book is devoted to these quotations (not to say that the first third or what not is simply block quoted text, but rather there’s so much of it).  This acts as both a blessing and a bane.  It’s cool to know what these people were thinking at the time or what they think about it now, but at the same time there’s a story to tell and it’s not always necessary for them to be in it.  In general I liked their presence in it (first-hand accounts really sold it for me), but overall this might not be a book for everyone.  If you’re really into cool little facts and details about gaming culture, this is your place.  If you’re looking for a more casual read, this probably isn’t the best place.

 Overall I liked the book and I’d reccomend it, but if you’re not interested in a sizeable read (its 400 pages) or a detailed account of gaming history i would go somewhere else.

So yeah, that’s my account of The First Quarter.  Catch you later!

 -Z

A common thread: The identity of social networking, gaming or otherwise

So I’ve been surfing - one could say perusing - my pageflake for awhile and i’ve noticed that over the last few weeks it’s been pinging more than a few links regarding the gaming community online.  One was about mytopia that I profiled in the previous post. Another was about world of warcraft - really nothing more than a treatment of its large community, but still interesting nonetheless in that it spoke to the idea as if something new.  Is it really that curious, that unknown - I almost want to say foreign - that gamers are so widespread and have banded together to form groups in the games they play? 

I can see it now - the main stream media looking at video games as just another statistic, something that 53% of Americans (and only 21% of Women) have done before, and so we have Diamond Phillips or whatever his name is from Dateline NBC come on to do an expose on the topic.

 Is that really accurate?  I don’t think so.  Sure gaming was considered outside the mainstream culture in the 90’s (and even then I would argue the early to mid 90’s, not the late 90s), but with the advent of the internet and applications like Xbox Live that clique has gotten quite the lot bigger.  So then, how can we say with such baited breath that perhaps gaming has hit the primetime, that its now come from the shadows and become something that we can recognize as “well, we all do it”?  I don’t think we can.  I think it’s just the mainstream media being its usual “public discourse/awareness” self and realizing “oh, hey - i don’t think we’ve done an article on this for quite some time.  Go, quick, write a little this-that-and-the-other-thing and give it to us in 15 minutes.”  Granted, that’s a bit facetious, but the point remains that such surprises, if not the overall hesitancy in the media to recognize the gaming culture as a standard issue and not something new, are absurd.  Give us our time in the light, if you so want, and move on.  There’s nothing to see here - except, of course, for a few hundred million users. 

Perhaps you want to do an expose about it?  I can give you my number.

Mytopia: the union of casual gaming with social networking

An interesting little site i found thanks to my pageflake is http://www.mytopia.com/.  It functions in quite the curious way.  Instead of serving simply as a hub server side for users to log onto, similar to a casual MMO, it grabs onto a social networking site, such as facebook, and can be added as an application or a widget.  Once added, the user can log in through these portals to the game proper;  this way, social networkers/bookmarkers are brought together in a casual gaming atmosphere while never leaving their social site.

 Ingenious!  I’ve never thought of that before - a casual gaming site that lets the user dictate where they play from.  Think of how widespread this could become!  Not necessarily this game proper - it only professes to house a select few casual games and chat functionality - but the template could easily be replicated to a whole host of platforms.  Think risk, but across websites!  Or maybe you can play capture the flag over the internet, logging onto different url’s as squares on the map, or even a scavenger hunt by means of logging in through certain links!

 The possibilities are endless.

Guitar Hero vs. Rock Band

Okay so this isn’t really going to be a link-heavy posting - rather, this is more along the lines of a not-random musing on a topic that’s pretty close to my heart: innovation and gaming. In this case we have music beat/rhythm games, namely Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Now we all know Guitar Hero.  When it first came out it was the shit!  Not only did you get to play all those awesome songs, but you got to play those awesome songs!  I mean, that was some really hot stuff back then.  And then Guitar Hero II came out and added multiplayer (if i remember right, anyway - i kinda got into the Guitar Hero scene late, the end of two and the beginning of three really) and Guitar Hero III added the boss battles and the semblance of combat between players (if only by proxy of the events). 

 Now this was pretty cool, and inded playing songs can be (and is) an exciting enterprise.  I’ll never forget the first time I picked up the guitar to play the music games (Note: It was Drum mania/Guitar Freaks at my local hang out, James Games) and i still love them today.  But one thing still seems to be missing from the Guitar Hero equation:

A team atmosphere.

I like being with my friends when i’m playing my songs, but i like it even more when they’re playing those songs with me.  And they’re not just playing them with me, but we’re playing those songs together.  Get the difference?  We’re not just teaming up for the moment a la two guys in an FPS deathmatch who decide for their interests (and survival) to take out the leader guy on the map (*coughCoutner-Strikecough*), but rather we’re banding (haaa) together to survive - this is all of us here, not one of us with others.  And that’s what i feel Rock Band gives me.

 I don’t know, maybe i was spoiled by Guitar Freaks and got used to having a guitarist, bassist, and a drummer for doing all my songs, but the idea of innovation that Guitar Hero has in mind, which is to say releasing new editions of the same game and substituting different soundtracks for each iteration, sounds interesting to me insofar as i’d like to see the new songs they have for sale, but not the game itself.  It’s still me whaling away on my guitar all day long, while my friends watch on in amazement of my skills.

 I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have them whaling away with me.  There’s one thing I like in games, if not gaming in general, and that’s teamwork, a team atmosphere.  Rock Band gives me that, and more.  We have a freaking mic!  What does Guitar Hero decide to give us?  Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.  Whup-tee-doo.  Sign me up for the Rock Band online music store so i can avoid paying $30 for another 14 songs, please? 

There’s innovation and then there’s iteration.  Guitar Hero, for all its past success, can’t seem to tell the difference.  For their sake i hope they can, for if they keep shelling out new sequels, sequelitis is likely to bite them in the ass, and soon it won’t be them whaling from the golden mountain on high, but another.

You gotta love a community that bands together

So for those of you who don’t know,  an online blogger by the name of Jesse McPherson had his xbox360, macbook, and tv stolen while he was away at a gaming convention.  While this isn’t necessarily news-worth all on its own - sad a guy gets jacked, right? - what pings this on the radar is the massive online response to this guy’s plight. 

Jesse here gets back home from work (where his coworkers got together and bought him a replacement 360!), loaded up his 360 and live, and what do you know but there’s a message from the guy who stole from him, taunting him and saying that he’d be willing to sell it all back to Jesse!  The audacity to even do that is…extreme!

However, someone didn’t think their cunning plan all the way through.

 Jesse is a blogger.  He got jacked, guy taunts him, he records the message and posts it (and the gamertag ID) online.  PLUS he looks up local pawn shops to see if someone tried to turn in his stuff and whatdya know but they did and the store owner caught video of the guy’s face!

 To make a long story short, this gets posted on digg.com and the issue explodes.  Thousands of people rally to Jesse’s defense, messaging the theif to return his stuff, calling him out for what he had done, and in general ruining this guy’s day for stealing someone’s stuff.

 The thief gets under so much pressure that he decides “to hell with it” and returns everything (well, except the tv - haven’t heard anything about that lately)! 

 Just goes to show you what the power of the internet (and a coupel thousand angry gamers) can do.  Note to self: Do not ever try to steal someone’s WiFi at the next LAN party. 

 -Z

p.s. Oh and yeah, for those of you keeping score out there: Jesse took this to the police (with the video, pictures, extortion recordings et all), but they decided it wasn’t worth the effort and told him no dice.  Isn’t that wonderful.

YOU GOT THE NEW HIGH SCORE!

So I was looking at Kotaku earlier today and I saw Rockstar’s announcement of an online service compatible with Xbox Live and the Playstation Network to record and display high scores and stats for…well…pretty much anything you do in Grand Theft Auto IV. 

This got me to thinking about the social nature of gaming when it comes to achievements and high scores.  I don’t necessarily mean in terms of the Xbox live achievements (though certainly they play into this), but rather the basic idea of completing some task in the fastest time, or with the most points, and then using that high score or ability as a kind of status symbol or marker of superiority through which we can challenge and compete with others.  How many out there look at the high score leaderboards and spend the rest of their night going over and over that level, stage, or whatever trying their best to top it?  From personal experience, i can tell you quite alot - the arcade I go to (James Games in Upland, CA) has a few Wangan Midnight 3 racing cabinets that are frequently the site of time attack challenges (or simply a good race) and we keep track of the fastest times and races on the wall as you come in. 

   Competition is a core nature of the gaming element - indeed, it wouldn’t be much of a medium if some challenge wasn’t involved, even if its just with yourself i.e. a puzzle-solving game - but it seems to me that alot of people overlook this simplistic yet (I would say) widespread facet of the gaming community:  Competition by proxy, namely the scoreboards.  Next time you log onto xbox live or turn on your PC to play your favorite video game, take a minute to check out not just the high scores but who has them;  chances are you’ll find yourself looking at an unitentionally tight-knit community of gamers whose sole connection is the desire for and challenge of one-upping each other.  Does it look anything like this:

JON 1,210,348

JON 1,209,300

ABE 1,180,998

RIC 1,179,760

ABE 1,175, 360

If it does (and i bet you it will), you’ve just found youself another segment of the community: the high-score fanatics. 

-Zhuge

Which social bookmarking tool would be best for this blog?

This is a tough question, specifically because there are more than a few good answers. del.icio.us would be a good start not because of its search engine i.e. being able to search a topic, but rather because of the people who use it - i would be able to search a favorite group of people and go find something through there. Thinking about it, though, its search engine would be useful in terms of its cloud function - i could search by topic, and filter through that what everyone is linking to. That would be an interesting way to find things.

Digg.com works much the same way, so I’d be looking at it, specifically the gaming section, because there are so many people who are technofiles and gamers on that site. If an event or occurance of import happens in the community, we’ll know about it on digg.

Fyreball might also be a good place to look, as its community is comprised of alot of the the Interactive Media people, but it’s not large enough to really bring in the breadth of news and information that I’d be looking for.

Politics and Gaming

Video games have been a constant - and by constant i mean repetitive, beating-a-dead-horse-and-getting-nowhere constant - topic in politics, mainly as a scapegoat for violent events involving pretty much anyone under 25.  Columbine? Doom caused it.  Carjackings in miami?  Vice City’s at fault for that. 
Granted, this is a bit of hyperbole (from both sides - politicians for harping on it, gamers for dismissing it out of hand) and indeed relating to the topic at hand this is a discussion for another time, but Video games since the early 90’s and the ESRB have been a presence in politics relating to pretty much any social problems involving the younger generation.

See: Jack Thompson

Pageflake Tour

Hey all! Zhuge here. You can find my pageflake pagecast at http://www.pageflakes.com/ZhugeLiang/.

In my bookmarks and site listings, I tried to find not just topicality but diversity - I wanted to look at the groups that made up the video game community. Take this website that details gaming as both an art medium and an art form, for example. While probably not the first group you think of when someone says “Gaming,” their presence is indicative of the greater culture at hand. So, with no further ado:

My RSS Feeds

-Penny Arcade (Blog postings about the site proper and Tycho, one of its authors/subjects)

I saved this into my feed mainly because its one of my favorite sites; I frequent it often both as a source of entertainment and of information. More often than not Tycho and Gabe’s musings, both in comic form and in writing, relate to some major event or dialogue going on in the video game world. As such, not only is the comic a source of witty commentary regarding what is commonly regarded as the popular opinion regarding the topic at hand, but their blog postings are also eloquent and poignant as relating to said topic. Indeed, were it not for Tycho and Gabe i would not have known about the editorial scandal at Gamespot nor the implications of the Blizzard Acquisition.

-Kotaku

Kotaku is one of my major sources of information regarding events in the gaming community. Relevant, up-to-date, and varied as to the subjects of its coverage (Exclusive title releases and GDC updates have both been the subject of blog postings), Kotaku is an essential resource if one is to explore the video game world.

-Gamasutra

Gamasutra is a kind of overlay for Kotaku but delves a bit more into the personal side of gaming - that is, Gamasutra sometimes details the people behind the games. It is this aspect of the site, the touching upon the actors behind the scenes, that warrants its place on my RSS feed list.

-Gameology

Gameoloy is a much more academic site than any of the others, a vital resource in a world that is formed almost exclusively by opinion. Its breadth of subject material extends beyond video games proper to at times a more technological bent, but all of these in some fashion relate to the gaming medium as a whole. Be it research on how the brain in men differs from women in relation to rewards or how the Nintendo Wii can serve the role of Physical Therapist, Gameology is a unique resource in it scholarly approach to gaming.

-Games Are Art

Gamesareart is a very interesting site, to me, because it takes video games from an angle i never anticipated yet completely love - games as an art form. I’ve never before thought about games as a kind of cultural showcase, a kind of self expression, yet it makes complete sense from the cinematic angle. (Why didn’t I think about this before! Brilliant!) An awesome read, one i’m still very much delving into.

-IGN

IGN is one of the major players in the video game industry on the consumer side, as it is one of the largest game review sites on the net. Home to a host of forums and even more postings regarding how crappy xyz game is (but don’t forget how glorifyingly awesome Zelda OoT is!), you’ll be hard pressed to find another site as comprehensive in scale regarding the gamer community’s interaction wtih video gaming, if only due to its sheer readership (which begs the question: Is a video game site important/influential because so many people frequent it or do so many people frequent it because it is important/influential? Quite the chicken-and-egg scenario).

-1UP.com

Take the IGN description from above and multiply it x10. 1up.com is a kind of hub, a web-way leading to a plethora of other gaming resources. Serving at once as both a community resource for reviews and events and as a portal to further resources still, 1up is a unique entity in the consumer-side world of gaming (though, thinking about it for a bit, is a company dedicated to game reviews/community activities part of the consumer side or the production side of gaming? Does that depend on what we say they’re producing or consuming?)

My Zotero Bibliography

Both of the books I’m listing in my pageflake relate to the history of video games. I do this because i find the history of video games, let alone history in general, a very key resource when it comes to understanding video games in general. We have to know where we came from - what successes games and companies faced, what challenges they had to overcome(or, conversely, the challenges that overcame them) - if we’re to understand where we are going in this medium. Video gaming is very much a two-way process: The industry giants create the games for us, but we as consumers have a kind of democratic process, a voice in the system, by way of purchases and play time. As such, it is our responsibility to be aware of what’s going on in the video game world and the first step we can take in understanding that world is to take a look back at what’s been done before.

Also, it’s just a really cool read.

My Diigo Bookmarks/My Soulmate’s Bookmarks

I’m joining these two sections together because I don’t really use Diigo that much - i’m very much a habitual user of the same cadre of sites and as such, while bookmarks are important to me and useful as a mnemonic device, I already have on hand alot of what I currently use.

I chose my del.icio.us soulmate because of the variety of the resources he had described. Most important to me were the modding sites he had linked to. For those of you who don’t know, modding is the process by which someone takes a console and puts a special computer chip in the console so that i can play either foreign games, pirated games, or both. Modding is quite the controversial topic in gaming circles not just because of the piracy issue but because alot of the pirated software is foreign work that domestic consumers wouldn’t otherwise have access to. The debate over the rights of gamers to play software as opposed to the right of producers to select where they have distribution still rages, but sites like the ones Alex linked to serve as a glimpse into the one true gaming underground.

So that’s my Pageflake Tour. I’ll probably come back later and revamp it/edit it, but for now here’s my best. Now take your best shot!

-Z

KOF XII - Jaw-dropping awesomeness and a glimpse into the minds of gamer expectation and progress

Okay, so fresh off Kotaku is the news that King of Fighters XII is fully hand drawn.  Every single frame of animation, every background, and every detail is 100% by hand.  Can you freaking believe that?  Holy crap, not even Street Fighter 3: Third strike had that kind of effort!

When SNK showed off The King of Fighters XII at arcade show AOU in Japan and industry event GDC in San Francisco, the unanimous reply was: Nice cell shading. That, or it’s “just” hi-res 2D. Thing is, that’s totally incorrect. And for SNK, who’s been working on the game for the past three years, frustrating!

Most companies don’t do it because it is prohibitively expensive in regards to time.  Take a look at this quote:

In one day, one artist would be able to draw one frame and a half for whatever image he or she was working on.

A simple attack - a punch or kick - probably has about 30-40 frames of animation, more if they want extreme fluidity and a pleasing or stylistic appearance. In short, think of just how awesome a scale they must have set for themselves to get this project off the ground. Their roster is something like 32 characters, each with unique attacks and special moves!   In other words, HOLY CRAP!

My first thought to this, though - aside from the sheer jaw-dropping goodness that i see in this - is that Gamers take alot of this stuff for granted, either by means of “oh well cool - they should be pushing the bar” or by making this new awesomeness they’re experiencing the standard to measure everything. Either way, the 15 minutes of “oh how freaking AWESOME this is!” disappears in a puff of expectation and progress.  Look at Halo, Half-life, or Metal Gear Solid to see how this works.  Its amazing to experience the next level of gaming and detail, but its sobering to realize that said experience comes with a price - namely, in setting the bar, you become the bar.